Retro Studios made Portal-esque Wii pitch “Adept”, details on scrapped “The Blob Game” for DS

Thanks to Did You Know Gaming, we have insight into a couple of short-lived Retro Studios projects – specifically Adept and “The Blob Game”.

Adept was playable in a rough state, but was ultimately just a pitch that Nintendo turned out. It was running in the Metroid Prime 3 engine and was intended to show off mechanics. In late 2007 and into early 2008, Retro was working on Adept that took inspiration from Portal while evolving on the premise – primarily by introducing combat.

Adept would have used teleportation cylinders, and you’d be able to make as many as you’d want – rather than just the two that you could in Portal. Also planned were Force cylinders that would push anything inside upwards. With an Attraction cylinder, players could do things like magnetizing themselves to attract a heal item or have projectiles thrown back at an enemy. Fire and ice cylinders were available to battle enemies in combat, too.

While Nintendo and Kensuke Tanabe said no to Adept, Retro told Paul Tozour – who was leading the whole thing – that he could continue work on it if it was changed from a Wii project to DS. Since Paul didn’t think DS would be suitable, the idea was scrapped.

As for The Blob Game, Retro Studios was working on this one for DS. Did You Know Gaming describes it as “a physics-based 2D puzzler where you play as a sticky blob” and players would “use the touch screen to stretch the blob in one direction, then let go and it’d fling in the opposite direction.” Apparently it was pretty far along. Remember the Boo concept art from Retro we saw a few years back? It turns out Retro was going to pitch attaching the Boos to their new game.

Unfortunately, Nintendo wasn’t ultimately into the idea here. While Retro was enthusiastic about The Blob Game, the Big N didn’t feel it was special and didn’t want the company spending time on the project. However, tooling from its development found its way into Donkey Kong Country Returns.

The full video from Did You Know Gaming covering other cancelled Retro Studios projects like Raven Blade can be found below.